The ideal nominee for World Bank president

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Nowthings are getting interesting. Lesley Wroughton has the wonderful news: two very highly qualified non-American candidates — Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Jose Antonio Ocampo — are going to be nominated to be president of the World Bank. This really puts the pressure on the White House to knock it out of the park with their nomination, because Ngozi, in particular, is broadly regarded both within and outside the Bank as being pretty much perfect for the job. She’s a whip-smart economist, she’s honest, she’s imaginative, she’s dedicated, she’s expert at navigating the Bank’s labyrinthine bureaucracy and politics, and she’s passionate about the way that the Bank can really make the world a better place.

In 2008, I “interviewed” Ngozi for Portfolio magazine. Which means that I went down to Washington and got escorted in to her office. She then arrived, I asked her one short question, she gave me a fluent and wonderful 2,000-word answer while barely pausing for breath, and then she left for a meeting with Bob Zoellick.

It’s been five years since I first said that Ngozi would make an excellent World Bank president, and this nomination is long overdue. What’s more, she will have a lot of support within the World Bank’s board — the body which ultimately will make the decision as to whom to choose.

Of course, the board members do what they’re told to do by the bank’s shareholders — the world’s countries. And if the Europeans and the Americans all vote for the US candidate, then the US candidate will win. That’s the simple truth. But here’s the thing: everybody on the board pays at least a modicum of lip service to the idea that the job will go to the best candidate. When Christine Lagarde took over at the IMF, she got the job because she was European, and the European candidate always gets the job. But at the same time, everybody voting for her could say with a straight face that she was, in fact, the best candidate as well.

Now that Ngozi’s in the running, the US is going to find it incredibly difficult to nominate a relatively low-profile person like Susan Rice, because it’s almost impossible to make a credible case that Rice is a superior candidate to Ngozi on the merits. And other big names seem to be falling away:

U.S. Senator John Kerry and PepsiCo’s Indian-born CEO Indra Nooyi also made an Obama administration shortlist, according to a source, although Kerry has publicly ruled out the job and Nooyi is no longer in contention, according to another source.

This is really bad news, because by a process of elimination it more or less forces Obama to go with Larry Summers. Larry would be a dreadful nominee, and a worse president, in a job whose primary prerequisite is diplomacy. And before he’s even nominated, there’s already a website up, ForgetLarry.org, devoted to campaigning against him for the job. It covers pretty much all the bases, although it weirdly misses the Russia/Shleifer scandal: for that, check out Cathy O’Neil’s post from a couple of weeks ago.

I’ve talked to a fair number of people about this position, including a few who are quite sympathetic to Larry, and not one of them thinks that he would be good in the post. If the US forced the world to choose between Larry and Ngozi, it would have to expend an astonishing amount of diplomatic capital to twist the requisite number of arms to get him the job, just because no one would actually want to vote for him. Their hearts would be with Ngozi.

Remember that Larry has never held elective office: it’s pretty much inconceivable he ever could. And yet, in its own way, the president of the World Bank is indeed an elected office. The electorate is tiny and extremely elite, to be sure. But the board is still going to want to meet with him, and he’s going to give them his insincere I’m-just-humoring-you-because-I’m-smarter-than-you smile, and even the Europeans are going to start wondering whether they really have to give Larry the job, just because they want to retain their own grip on the IMF.

It’s entirely conceivable, in fact, that an anti-Larry faction might vote instead for Jeff Sachs, who has already been formally nominated by some very small countries, on the grounds that convention holds that the president of the World Bank has to be an American, rather than that it has to be the US nominee. Up until now, the US nominee has always been the only American nominee: this is the first time that isn’t the case. Which means that we might yet see Larry and Jeff split the status-quo votes, allowing unstoppable momentum to gather behind Ngozi.

So here’s one clever idea: Joe Stiglitz and Stan Fischer should throw their hats in the ring as well; I think that both of them would be able to find a country willing to nominate them. There would then be no fewer than four American nominees for the Bank’s board to choose from. Stiglitz is on the record saying that the most qualified candidate is likely to come from a developing country; his candidacy would be a way of providing the greatest possible range of candidates for anybody who feels like they have to vote for an American candidate but who doesn’t want to vote for Larry.

More realistically, Obama is going to have to come up with a real knock-out of a nominee, someone who would waltz into the job no matter who she was up against. Which is to say, Obama is going to have to nominate Hillary. Hillary has, we’re credibly told, ruled herself out for the job. Well, she might have to change her mind.

If Hillary is nominated, the job is hers: it’s as simple as that. And she would be very good at it, too. She wouldn’t even need to serve out a full term. While she had the job, she might even be able to engineer a way in which she could be succeeded by Ngozi, or some other highly-qualified candidate without a US passport. Which alone would make her one of the most important and revolutionary presidents in the Bank’s history.

Hillary is 64 years old — easily young enough to have one more big job before she retires. Does she want the job? Probably not. But she’d be great at it anyway. And she might have to accept the nomination, if only to ensure what she will be certainly working behind the scenes to achieve in any case — US continuity at the Bank at least through the 2012 elections. After that, I’m sure she can find a way to ease herself out if she really wants.